Daira Hopwood (8): Delete old protocol version constants and simplify code that used them. fixes #2244 Remove an unneeded version workaround as per @str4d's review comment. Remove unneeded lax ECDSA signature verification. Strict DER signatures are always enforced; remove the flag and code that used it. Repair tests for strict DER signatures. While we're at it, repair a similar test for CLTV, and make the repaired RPC tests run by default. Make transaction test failures print the comments preceding the test JSON. Fix a comment that was made stale before launch by #1016 (commit 542da61). Delete test that is redundant and inapplicable to Zcash.

kozyilmaz (3): [macOS] system linker does not support “--version” option but only “-v” option to disable building libraries (zcutil/build.sh) support per platform filename and hash setting for dependencies

Zcash [ZEC] Release v1.0.10-1

ZCASH [ZEC] Dev update - June 30, 2017

Release RetrospectiveThis week started off with a retrospective meeting on our release process and more specifically the most recent releases 1.0.10 and the subsequent 1.0.10-1 hotfix For the upcoming 1.0.11 release, we’re attempting a process where project coordinators for each of the Github projects nominate a few tickets to be considered by placing them into the newly created 1.0.11 planning

project which are then triaged by the release coordinator. The coordinators for each project are specified in the descriptions.

In reviewing what happened during investigation and response phases
which resulted in the 1.0.10-1 hotfix, we discussed the varying
situations which affect our internal security incident response
procedure. Our intended goal for all security incident responses is to
remain as transparent as possible without risking vulnerability to
users, their ZEC or the Zcash network, however many incidents may stem
from an already public report or obvious behavior of the client. In the
case of 1.0.10, several folks noticed problems connecting to non-1.0.10
peers after updating. We’ll continue to refine this process but would
like to re-emphasize to anyone who may discover a sensitive security
vulnerability to contact

Beswick1
is the codename for the project focused on enhancing basic payment
features in Zcash. We had a topical meeting about the scope of this
project and decided that deprecating/bug fixing non-z_ calls, improving z_sendmany and introducing new z_* calls would all be relevant. An example of an improvement to z_sendmany is spending from multiple addresses to one or more shielded addresses (#2408 An example of a new call is z_shieldcoinbase (#2248)

Features like private multi-sig and anything else slated for the Sapling upgrade or specific to payment offloading/payment disclosure are out of scope.

Website, UX & Documentation
We’re working on
smoothing out our translation management process of the website. While
being able to communicate to the global Zcash community is important to
us, our current translation management has a lot of overhead and we’re
finding inaccuracies in some of the translations so restructuring this
has become a priority for us.

We're also continuing to consult about improving the flow for
visitors through the website in considering the range of interest and
experience: from technical/developer to mainstream/don't know what
cryptocurrencies are.

We’ve reviewed the reports from the first stage of the UX research
project we started and will be distributing this information over the
next few weeks via blogs and potentially a Google hangout presentation.

More progress was made on centralizing documentation and we hope to
soon have a single place for users and developers to go for tutorials
and valuable information on using or developing with Zcash. We're also
going to look for a tool to host some of our meeting notes for public
access. By default, we've been keeping meeting notes private but in a
lot of cases, they can be made open to the community.

ZCASH [ZEC] Dev update - July 7, 2017

Sapling planningThis week started off with another meeting to discuss the Sapling protocol upgrade While last time we focused on a lot of UI considerations that the upgrade would provide, this meeting was focused more on the crypto and proving system.

One of our engineers and a few of the scientists have been studying a new elliptic curve called BLS12-381 which was introduced in our blog a little while ago. This curve offers improved efficiency while also increasing the security margins. We’ve decided to go ahead and give the green light on using this new curve.

We also discussed the Groth16 proving system which would increase proving speed by requiring less components in the construction and resulting in a smaller proof size overall. We’re a little more hesitant to give this a green light and want to take the time first for writing a proof showing it can’t be broken. That said, we’re enthusiastic about the enhancements it allows such as cheap and indistinguishable pay-to-verification-key payments (#24254) This proving system would also enable a simpler and safer multi-party computation ceremony process (#22473)

Next steps are benchmarking for time and memory consumption.

The agenda and notes from this meeting are in the Zcash github wiki We encourage anyone interested in Sapling upgrade to join us in our upcoming meetings by reaching out to us for an invite!

Release prepTime this week was also spent on preparing for the upcoming 1.0.11 CI deployment and release milestones which are being organized in the 1.0.11 release project

on Github. You can see which issues were nominated to include in the upcoming milestones and out of those, which ones were marked as accepted, nice-to-have and rejected. Next week will see the 1.0.11 CI milestone in preparation for the subsequent week’s 1.0.11 release milestone

XCAT, Beswick, DocumentationProgress was made on various other projects including work on an XCAT proof of concept for Ethereum. Also, further design and improvement discussions for Beswick

and work on more user friendly documentation via Readthedocs progressed.

Next week’s update
Heads up: I’ll be traveling
late next weekend to the other side of the world so might end up having
to postpone the dev update again or make it shorter than normal.

Since I missed last week’s dev update, this week will overview work from previous 2 weeks.

1.0.11 ReleaseVarious issues for the upcoming 1.0.11 release have progressed including adding a field to listunspent output to show whether the UTXO is a coinbase transaction (#2446) a restriction to spending from shielded addresses when minconf=0 (#2519) removing UPnP support (#2500), etc

We also sent out an alert to remaining 1.0.10 nodes enabling safe mode as part of this milestone.

We have an updated release process we're trying which involves
deploying and testing a release candidate 1 week prior to main release.
Next week should see the RC for 1.0.11 and testing with the following
week deploying the regular 1.0.11 release. This updated process comes as
a result of our mistake in the 1.0.10 release which required a 1.0.10-1
hotfix (the current version). The goal is to drastically reduce any
need for hotfix releases in the future by catching issues in the RC.

BeswickProgress was made on design for a new RPC z_shieldcoinbase for shielding all coinbase UTXOs in wallet (#24482).

Dev outreach
Our team has been doing a lot of
outreach the past two weeks as well: Zooko and Paige were in China
meeting businesses and developers; Str4d and Sean attended PETS (which ZcashCo was a sponsor for) & Ariel and Jay participated in the IC3 Ethereum bootcamp and as a result made a lot of great progress on the implementation of ZEXCAT (Zcash-Ethereum).

ZCASH [ZEC] Dev Update 28/07/2017

Release cycle and 1.0.11
We continued our discussions for refining the release process this week
and decided to extend the release cycle overall by 2 more weeks starting
with 1.0.12. This puts us in a better position for having adequate time
to do a release candidate and proper testing before the full release.
The last couple of releases saw delays due to lack of time so we’re
adjusting the cycle now to avoid having more last minute postponements.
We’ll continue to do retrospectives on the release cycle for any other
adjustments that may help us.

The 1.0.11 release
is currently scheduled for this Monday, July 31st but might slip
another day or two. We finished up reviewing and merging pull requests
for the RC which should be ready shortly, however since we intended for
the RC to be out yesterday and there’s a chance that testing will take
longer than expected or bugs will be found, there’s a chance of a
release mid-next week instead. We’ll keep you all updated on this thread with concrete decisions.

XCAT
More progress is being made on XCAT and this week a test transaction
between Zcash and Bitcoin test networks was successfully executed.
Currently the demo requires full nodes with synced blockchains so the
next step is working on an implementation that can use light clients. We
intend to have an internal meeting on this next week to demo the
process further and figure out the last steps before we release a
working version for the public.

Sapling
More discussion happened this week about the Sapling upgrade, particularly in relation to asymmetric payment construction (#2277.

Miscellaneous
We’re starting to look into another round of security audits as we want
to maintain a regular schedule for auditing the core code.

We set up a clearer communication channel with Poloniex for future
issues that they might run into or for any support they want to request
from us. Our announcement related to the recent Poloniex downtime is
posted here.

Zcash [ZEC] Release v1.0.11-rc1

Zcash [ZEC] Dev Update - August 4, 2017

1.0.11 RC and release & 1.0.12 planning
We decided to shift our schedule for 1.0.11 as documented in Zcash forum comment
and ended up waiting until this past Monday to create the 1.0.11
release candidate. The official release is scheduled for this upcoming
Monday (August 7th) so be sure to keep an eye out for that and be ready
to upgrade.

We also started some initial steps for planning the 1.0.12 release
which is (as mentioned in last week’s update) going to come 6 weeks
after 1.0.11 which sets it up for a release on September 18.

XCAT
We had an internal demo of the ZBXCAT implementation (a protocol for
exchanging Zcash & Bitcoin without a central party) this week and
are planning for a public demo via livestream in the coming weeks. We
don’t have any specific release dates for the first version yet, but
progress is moving along nicely and we’re now at a point where we can
focus on refactoring the code and writing tests.

Payment offloading
A version of payment offloading for transparent addresses was also completed (PR 21201)
and should be ready as an experimental feature very soon. This version
of payment offloading will allow clients without the minimum resource
requirements to generate a zero-knowledge proof to send from a
transparent address to a shielded address by delegating the high-demand
processes to a server-like proving service. It will be a big step
towards improving mobile and hardware wallet support in the Zcash
ecosystem.

Hiring
As you may (or may not) have noticed, the past couple months at Zcash
have been slower moving than the months following launch. This is due to
many circumstances but in the end, it comes down to a lack of
sufficient engineers to keep up the pace. So we’re hiring! While we’ve
been asking around for recommendations on a semi-private basis, we also
wanted to reach out to the public as to not miss out on any candidates
we wouldn’t notice otherwise. Before going public, however, we wanted to
set up an efficient process for hiring and are now at a point where we
feel comfortable announcing the first role we’re hoping to fill soon: an engineering project manager

So if you know of anyone who might fit the description in that
listing, please forward the above link to them and tell them to reach
out to us ASAP. We also plan to include additional job listings very
soon so keep an eye out on the jobs page of our website.

Show & Tell
Finally, we’re excited to announce that next week we’re hosting @jasondavieszcash-sprout-verifier4. The livestream will take place Friday August 11 at 18:00 UTC and can be accessed here.

Zcash [ZEC] New block explorer at zcashnetwork.info

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of hardware for a dedicated node by Peter of http://zcash.flypool.org/ have a new Insight block explorer up at https://zcashnetwork.info that has much faster hardware and 4 times as much RAM as where insight.mercerweiss.com was hosted (that url still works BTW, but only with non-ssl now).

The new system is also in the EU region, which is where the majority of traffic for it originates. The previous Insight instance remains in place and will be re-purposed to be for Patron only access by Node level sponsors on my patreon at https://patreon.com/radix42

which will also include private access to the experimental remote

proving service soon, as well as all other lower level rewards.

As always one time donations towards my public infrastructure services are always welcome! Addresses for which are on the Donations section of my website at https://zcash.mercerweiss.com/

ZCASH [ZEC] Dev Update About New Release, Future priorities & More

Releases
This week we completed generating a bunch of test data that will aid us
with some benchmarks we plan to use to help diagnose wallet performance
issues. We’ve tested these benchmarks in our dev-ci infrastructure with
plans to get them into the production CI server next week.

The overall theme for 1.0.12 is to focus on benchmarking issues users have been experiencing so that we

can implement fixes as soon as we understand how to best address them. If there’s enough time, these fixes could be part of 1.0.12 but are more likely to be addressed in 1.0.13.

We also re-signed the 1.0.11 package because some users on Debian
stretch were seeing warnings or errors regarding an unsupported
signature type. If you have been experiencing issues upgrading to
1.0.11, try updating again.

We also had a retrospective meeting about the 1.0.11 release so that
we could diagnose the process issues we had which resulted in delays.
After taking the time for analyzing the planning, coordinating and
development slippage, we feel much more prepared for staying on track
for future releases and communicating in advance for times we feel the
need to postpone.

Future priorities

Our Show & Tell6 last week to demo XCAT was a big step for our engineers who have been

developing a cross-chain atomic trade protocol between Zcash and Bitcoin

used in the demo and will continue to work on improvements and testing over time.

We’re also making progress on research for Sapling and in particular
the new MPC protocol we plan to use for generating the new zk-SNARK
parameters. An announcement with more details about the improvements and
a research paper will be forthcoming.

Miscellaneous

Our subsequent UX research project is just getting started. It will compliment the initial research we published a couple weeks ago and we’ll publish the new results as

soon as they’re ready! We’re very excited to be continuing this research, not only to support the Zcash ecosystem but also for general cryptocurrency adoption by addressing fundamental UX challenges.

We’re making headway on migrating our website and blog to more
scalable solutions given our current support for 8 languages and
interest in expanding even further. This migration will also introduce a
reorganization of content on the site to help us communicate more
effectively. Stay tuned!

We had a sync-up on the 1.0.12 release at the beginning of the week to check on the status and requirements for the coming weeks. While we anticipate the RC date (upcoming Monday) could slip by a day, we still plan to stay on track for an official 1.0.12 releaes on Sept. 25.

The extended release cycle seems to be a positive and stabilizing
decision and our focus on performance and user support related issues
this time around will let us focus on feature improvement in the
upcoming releases (which we certainly are anticipating and excited for).

feature introduced in 1.0.9 will kick in soon (as a rule, after 18 weeks for each release thereafter). This means at block 193076 all 1.0.9 nodes which do not have the -diabledeprecation=1.0.9 flag set to disable this feature will automatically shut down. At this point, any 1.0.9 nodes should be receiving a related message about the upcoming version deprecation. Note that the deprecation and new release will fall at about the same time since we extended our release cycle to 6 weeks. If you’re still running 1.0.9, you probably don’t care to be on top of the most recent version anyways so upgrading to 1.0.11 right before we release 1.0.12 is probably not a big deal to you. But if you’d like to change your ways, we suggest upgrading to 1.0.11 now (or at least before block 193076) then again to 1.0.12 to be on the bleeding edge of Zcash

UX & Website migration
As part of our ongoing studies of UX in the Zcash ecosystem, we’re
excited to be taking a peek at a really cool piece of software just
released in beta (major hint ) and how the process feels for someone spending ZEC.

We’re also diving into migrating our website, blog and the whole
translation process to a more scalable solution. With 8 supported
languages, a lot of the translation management has become burdensome
using our current website framework. We’re excited to expand to more
languages but want to make this transition first so further expansion
can be easier to manage overall.

ZCASH [ZEC] Release v1.0.12-rc1

Download:

ZCASH announce the addition of Zcash to the highest-volume cryptocurrency exchange in the world

Zcash on Bithumb

We are very pleased to announce the addition of Zcash to the highest-volume cryptocurrency exchange in the world Bithumb of South Korea. With

the evolving regulatory situation in China for all cryptocurrencies, it's promising to see the Zcash ecosystem continuing to grow in the greater Asian market and around the world.

This announcement not only opens up access to Zcash for more people but also allows users to benefit from Bithumb's listing of ZEC through a promotional "cash back" program. Users who trade with ZEC before the promotion concludes will earn additional ZEC. You can find more details on the program on the cash back announcement page.

The VP of Bithumb, Jung-A Lee, expressed four reasons to support Zcash:

Strong, stable network.

Tons of transactions already sent.

World-wide mining and trading.

Zero-knowledge proof technology.

Bithumb's Korean customers are some of the most eager traders in the
world creating exceptional liquidity for the cryptocurrencies listed on
Bithumb's platform. The improved access to ZEC and the subsequent
increase in exchange volume are important for Zcash's global, long-term
market presence. Bithumb's Zcash support introduces the opportunity for
one million new users to join the Zcash ecosystem.

Bithumb joins a growing list of exchanges supporting Zcash in different regions around the world. Exchanges considering adding Zcash support should reach out to us via email or by joining our community chat, we'd be happy to help!

Zcash [ZEC] Release Wallet v1.0.12

Today we're announcing the release of Zcash 1.0.12, which
includes bug fixes and usability improvements. It also adds a new RPC
method z_shieldcoinbase as an experimental feature, for
easily shielding coinbase UTXOs. We encourage mining pools and exchanges
to test it out over the next few weeks, and give feedback, before we
make it a fully-supported RPC method in an upcoming release.

Zcash [ZEC] New Exchange Update

We're happy to announce that CEX.IO is the newest exchange to list Zcash trading!

CEX.IO is a multi-functional cryptocurrency exchange serving a range
of users from beginners to institutional traders. Now with the inclusion
of Zcash, not only is trading ZEC more accessible to UK and European
markets but CEX.IO is also unique amongst the large exchanges to offer
funding to and withdrawing from accounts using credit or debit cards.
This feature provides a quick, simple and therefore important on-ramp
for new and existing users to acquire Zcash.

From CEX.IO CEO Alex Lutskevych:
"We at CEX.IO are strict in terms of choosing cryptocurrencies for our
markets. Zcash functionality and the technology standing behind the coin
are a strong background promising the growth. We see it as a successful
example of a service built using Bitcoin protocol and adding extra
privacy. To meet the strong demand of our users, Zcash market on CEX.IO
will be launched with 4 trading pairs: ZEC/USD, ZEC/EUR, ZEC/GBP, and
ZEC/BTC”.

Established in 2013 and over one million registered users, CEX.IO
serves consumers with bank accounts and credit/debit cards in many
countries and, at the time of this post, 24 US states.

Additionally, with consumer demand CEX.IO will add Zcash bundles to their platform, providing a fast way to purchase fixed amounts of ZEC with a card or bank account.

CEX.IO joins a growing list of markets supporting Zcash. Other exchanges considering adding Zcash support should check out our integration guide and reach out to us in email or by joining our community chat, we'd be happy to help!

Zcash [ZEC] Dev Update - New Release & Communication & education

Release

This week we continued working on writing and reviewing pull requests for the 1.0.13 release. There was focus on infrastructure components such as migrating upstream’s MiniNode support release. There was focus on infrastructure components such as migrating upstream’s MiniNode support (PR 2533) builder improvements (PR 2648) benchmarks for listunspent (PR 2650) new driver scripts for the test suite (PR 2654) and a memory benchmark for validatelargetx (PR 2659).

ready as an experimental feature having done some code reviews and subsequent fixes. Next week we’ll do another round of reviews and will work further on the associated ZIP

Communication & education

We’re getting ready for a Zcash sponsored zero-knowledge workshop at the
upcoming Ethereum Devcon where several of our scientists and engineers
will present on recent research and development. We’re happy to have
significant slot at Devcon to represent work in Zcash and to continue
collaborations with Ethereum developers to progress zero-knowledge in
blockchains for the entire ecosystem.

Relatedly, this week we had the opportunity to present at events
(Paralelni Polis Hackers Congress & Munich Bitcoin meetup) alongside
some of the Monero community. This was a really nice opportunity to get
some face-time with the people enthusiastic about a competing
technology for some bridge building and positive, constructive debate. I
highly recommend our community to take similar in-person opportunities
to engage with Monero folks. After all, we have the same goals to
achieve private cryptocurrency and while the methods to achieve that are
pretty different, there’s a lot we can learn from each other.

We also continued work on revamping the backend of our blog to
facilitate better filtering of categories i.e. heavy math posts vs.
ecosystem announcements.

Acknowledgments and credits

Acknowledgements

This miner is based on Equihash Miner for NiceHash
Thanks to Zcash developers for providing most of the code
Special thanks to tromp for providing optimized CPU equihash solver
Special thanks to xenoncat for providing assembly optimized CPU equihash solver
Special thanks to Zcash Community on Slack46

By,

justvanbloom

Donation justvanbloom

ZCASH [ZEC] Dev update - DevCon3 & Zcash family gathering & Release

evCon3 & Zcash family gathering

Before diving into the recap of engineering work, I’d like to share that after our successful participation in DevCon3 last week, we had an internal Zcash family gathering at a nearby location. For operational security reasons, we did not disclose that this gathering was taking place and because a good amount of the Zcash team would be in Cancun for DevCon3 anyways, we figured it would be a good opportunity to gather for in-person collaboration and a Zcash Birthday celebration. This meeting included internal sessions in which we reviewed a preliminary engineering roadmap, marketing & community goals, balancing governance between the company and foundation, etc.

Expect to see much of what we discussed come to light over the coming
months, particularly the roadmap to network upgrade 0 (formally known
as hard fork 0) and Sapling.

We’ve also hired several new people over the last months (still
trying to wrangle headshots and bios out of them for the website and an
introductory blog post so stay tuned for official announcement) so this
was a good opportunity to formally welcome them to the team.

Release
In a previous update, we announced our plans to push back the 1.0.13
release by 1 week due to low engineering resources from traveling to
Cancun and now we’re announcing it will be pushed back another week to
Nov. 20 due to similar reasons. If there was any chance of us getting
the release out for the 13th, we would have needed a release candidate
done early this week for testing throughout the remainder of the week.
The RC hasn’t happened yet (but it’s almost ready) and our new, more
realistic plan is to instead have it for early next week.

into the client so baring any major issues that may turn up during RC testing next week, you can expect to have shielded address memory consumption reduced down to about 1 GB from 3 GB. If you’ve been paying attention, you’d know that the upcoming Sapling improvements will further reduce memory consumption down to just 40 MB but while we’re still in Sprout, this is a great intrim milestone!